HGB Ep. 507 - Mount Washington Hotel

Moment in Oddity - The Hambone Award

There is an award that is celebrated every year although it's not the Oscars nor the Emmys. It is the Hambone Award. This award was named after a dog who suffered from hypothermia due to being stuck in a refrigerator. The dog ended up eating an entire ham prior to being released. Unexpected accidents can happen to our furred, feathered or scaled companions and Nationwide Insurance decided to raise awareness of all the accidents that our critter kids can encounter. Each year the competition features pets who survived harrowing circumstances with the help of their pet parents as well as medical professionals. The event has been around for 15 years. With Nationwide insuring over one million pets, there are plenty of competitors vying for the award each year. The winner of The Hambone Award receives a trophy, gift card and Nationwide donates money to a pet charity of the owners choice. Our pets mean the world to us, but winning a competition for surviving the most dire, death defying, disaster certainly is odd.

This Month in History - First World Series Radio Broadcast

In the month of October, on the 5th, in 1921, the first radio broadcast of the World Series took place. Station WJZ Radio in Newark, New Jersey had only hit the airwaves a mere four days prior. Their management wanted to cause a big sensation by being the first radio station to broadcast a World Series game. The teams that went head to head for the broadcast were the New York Giants and the New York Yankees. This was the first appearance of the Yankees at the World Series. The broadcast was voiced by Tommy Cowan in what would be a very unique fashion. Mr. Cowan was not at the game but instead was in the radio studio. He stood in front of a microphone while holding a telephone to his ear. On the other end of the line was a newspaper employee giving Cowan the play by play from the ballpark. As basic as that all sounds, Tommy Cowan wanted to impress the management and listeners with his production. On the day before the game, Cowan went to his inventor friend Thomas Edison and asked if he could borrow Edison's phonograph and records. These were used to play background music during the World Series Broadcast. The next day the Giants defeated the Yankees and the broadcast was a great success. Clearly, Tommy Cowan hit it out of the park.  

Mount Washington Hotel

Omni Hotels & Resorts own a long list of haunted hotels and they embrace that reputation. One of their hotels is the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. This is a beautiful location surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest, so it is no wonder that the rich would make this one of their playgrounds. Some of the grandest hotels ever built in America's history, were built here. Perhaps it is that link to the Gilded Age that has locked in spectres to this establishment. Join us as we share the history and hauntings of the Mount Washington Hotel.

Bretton Woods is a village in the town of Carroll, New Hampshire. Carroll came from a land grant awarded by King George III in 1772 to Sir Thomas Wentworth and 82 other men. Wentworth named the village after his ancestral home in Yorkshire, England, which was called Bretton Hall. The village is surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest. The Presidential Range is part of the White Mountains and the tallest peak in this range is Mount Washington. As a matter of fact, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeastern United States. The indigenous people who lived here called the mountain Agiochook, which means "the place of the Great Spirit or Concealed One." The Abenaki people believed that the tops of tall mountains were the dwelling places of gods and so they would not climb Mount Washington out of deference to the gods they believed resided there. When European settlers came, they built taverns to meet the needs of visitors to the area and these eventually became hotels that grew into the Grand Hotels that the White Mountains became known for. 

Joseph Stickney was born in 1840 in Concord, New Hampshire. In 1860, he became interested in anthracite coal mining and he formed the company Stickney, Conyngham & Co. Stickney made a fortune in the coal mining business before he was even thirty. He and his partner in the coal business, John N. Conyngham, bought Mount Pleasant House in the White Mountains from lumberman John T. G. Leavitt in 1881. Mount Pleasant House had been built in 1875 and was one of three grand hotels in Bretton Woods at that time. This hotel started off as a box-like structure with forty rooms, but it would grow to become one of the largest and finest of the Grand Hotels. After Stickney bought it, he added a fourth story, added several buildings and brought in the latest amenities, like private baths. By 1894, Stickney had bought out his partners and was sole owner of Mount Pleasant House. He bought more land and planned to expand, which included an electric power plant that could provide power for 750 lights, a 400 foot Artesian well, an elevator powered by water, a water tank for the laundry, a bowling alley, a blacksmith shop, a golf course, tennis courts and a private lake, which he named for his wife Carolyn, whom he married in 1894. Two rail lines brought guests to the hotel.

Stickney eventually decided to build another hotel and he named it the Mount Washington Hotel, which today is one of the few remaining grand hotels of the Gilded Age. Henry Flagler recommended that Stickney hire architect Charles Alling Gifford to design Mount Washington. Gifford also designed the Jekyll Island Club, where in 1910 a group of elites gathered to develop the Federal Reserve System. Gifford's design was in the Renaissance Revival style. Ground was broken in 1900 and Stickney spared no expense in the construction. The hotel would cost $1.7 million to build, which is $52 million in today's money. Mount Washington was built with a steel network and a complicated heating and plumbing system were installed, all of which were uncommon at the time. Two hundred and fifty Italian craftsmen worked on the structure installing 2,000 doors, 12,000 windows and eleven miles of plumbing pipes. The interior featured Tiffany-stained glass, intricate Italian plasterwork and crystal chandeliers. There was a Conservatory with an acoustic dome. The hotel is striking with its white painted exterior of stucco and granite, crowned by red roofs.

The Grand Opening was hosted on July 28, 1902. The hotel boasted a staff of 350 people. As many as 50 trains came through Bretton Woods every day, bringing the wealthy and famous to stay, which included three U.S. Presidents, Thomas Edison, Joan Crawford, Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill. Important historic events took place here. Some of the listeners may have heard the term "Bretton Woods" in regards to the Bretton Woods System of money and finance. The Bretton Woods International Monetary Conference was hosted at Mount Washington in 1944 with delegates from 44 nations. That meeting set up the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and designated the United States dollar as the main currency of international exchange. The documents making all these items official were signed in the Gold Room off the Hotel Lobby. This system, which was meant to stabilize economies and prevent another Great Depression and was built on conversion of dollars with gold, was ended in 1971 when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. That made it possible to print money without any thought as to debt and such. Needless to say, leaving the gold standard has helped put America into...wait, let me check because this literally changes every second...$33,101,965,802,900 trillion for the National Debt. To put that into perspective, since WE are the government in America, there are 331.9 million people in the US, so each of you owes $99,734.

Stickney didn't get to enjoy the success of his new hotel for long. He died on December 21, 1903 from a heart attack at 64 and he left both Mount Pleasant and Mount Washington to his wife Carolyn. She remarried in 1913 to French Prince Aymon de Faucigny-Lucinge, making her a princess. The Stickneys had no children, so when Carolyn passed in 1936, she left the hotels to her nephew, F. Foster Reynolds. He decided to demolish the Mount Pleasant House in 1939. A motel now stands on the property. Mount Washington Hotel closed in 1942 because of World War II. A Boston syndicate bought it in 1944 and reopened it and then sold it eleven years later, in 1955 to Mr. and Mrs. Morris J. Fleisher of Philadelphia and they ran it until 1969. Then the Mount Washington Development Company acquired it at that time and they developed the nearby Bretton Woods Ski Area. This company consolidating the original Stickney Estate. In 1975, the Bretton Woods Corporation acquired the property and they got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The woodlands around the property were sold to the United States government who founded the White Mountain National Forest. By 1986, the United States Department of the Interior gave the hotel a National Historic Landmark designation, along with the 1896 Bretton Arms Inn, which is a Victorian inn located on the Hotel grounds. 

A group of New Hampshire businessmen joined forces and purchased the property in 1991. CNL Lifestyle Properties, Inc. bought the hotel in 2006 and they began a major renovation on the property that cost $90 million. They sold to the current owners, Omni Hotels & Resorts, in December of 2015. Omni had already been managing the hotel since 2009. There are approximately 600 year-round employees, which grows to over 1,000 in winter. The hotel features the Four Diamond Main Dining Room with a casual yet sophisticated dining experience and Stickney's Restaurant, which features a cozy setting to enjoy delicious American cuisine.

Based on the stories we've heard from so many sources, Mount Washington Hotel has to be one of the most haunted hotels in the United States. The most haunted room in the hotel is Room 314, the Princess' Room or Carolyn Stickney Suite. This had been Carolyn's old suite, hence the name. She likes to stay in her suite where her four-poster maple bed is still located and her apparition has been seen numerous times by staff and guests. The sightings started in 1936 after her death, mostly during the winter months when only caretakers and managers were there. They would watch her as she descended the stairs for dinner. Perhaps on her way to the single person table in the dining room that is still set for her every evening. Often, guests report smelling a floral perfume in the middle of the night in the Princess Room and sometimes when they wake up, they see Carolyn sitting at the end of the bed brushing her hair. Items will go missing and then show up in the strangest places. The lights also turn themselves off and on. One of the weirdest things to happen occurred when a group of employees were getting their photo taken in front of the hotel's veranda and the photo captured a woman in the window of the Princess' Room when no one was staying in there.

Music plays on its own in the ballroom. About the ballroom somebody said, "As I walked into the ballroom late one evening on a night where there was no performers I heard the faint sounds of an orchestra playing. I thought a rehearsal was going on and I went to see who it was. There was no one there. No one. As I walked away from the side of the stage, the lights suddenly went out and the music got louder. It was surreal and very, very scary. I ran to the light switch and saw that it had been turned off. I turned it back on and the lights went on for a second and then the switch turned down on its own! The entire time the music kept playing. I ran out and found security and told them what happened. They went in to investigate and found nothing — no music and no problem with the lights." 

Ghost Hunters visited the hotel in both 2008 and 2012. This was not only one of Grant's favorite places to investigate, so it was his second to the last episode before leaving Ghost Hunters the first time, but this IS Amy Bruni's favorite location. She hosts a Strange Escapes group there every year and she has been more times than she can count. She recounts a story in her book "Life with the Afterlife" on Pg. 151.

Diane was perusing a 2019 article entitled "A Mount Washington Ghost Story" written on the Classy Girls Wear Pearls website created by Sarah Vickers. The article is lengthy and throughout, Sarah comments that she didn't really believe in ghosts. She has visited the hotel many times and even stayed in Room 314 several times, without so much as a peep from Carolyn or any ghost. She is friends with Amy Bruni and attended the Strange Escapes at the hotel that year. After joining in on a few EVP sessions and an Estes Session, Sarah remained unconvinced about paranormal activity in the hotel. Until she and her fiance got back to their room.

She writes, "Kiel and I headed back to our room shortly afterwards for a bite to eat and to get ready for bed. We had a family suite with two bedrooms and a living room separating the bedrooms. Dan was in one room and we had the other room with Harry. When we stay at hotels we always leave the bedroom door open a crack with a light on for Harry (he sleeps in a portable crib next to our bed). We were snuggled up in bed for at least a half an hour when the bathroom light went out. 'Dan leave that light on that’s for Harry,' Kiel called out. There was no answer. Suddenly the door slammed. We were really confused that he would shut the door and turn off the lights on us. We assumed it was a practical joke. Kiel got out of bed to open the door and turn on the light. Dan was no where to be found. We opened up the door to his room and he was in bed unaware that anything had happened. We asked him several times if he closed the door on us and he responded that he never got out of bed. In that same instant Amy had just texted me to say there had been some activity in Suite 314. The ghost had been saying Kiel’s name over and over again on the EVP recording and we should go in there. At the time she wasn’t in the room. Her friend Grant Wilson, another cast member of Ghost Hunters, was hosting the session in the room and no one knew who we were. The group just found it interesting the the ghost was repeating the same name.

We were admittedly pretty freaked out. We tested the door a few times to see if maybe it shut easily, was on a slant, etc. but the carpet was too thick for it to have ever closed on its own. In a frantic state of mind we headed back to Carolyn’s suite in our pajamas. I didn’t bother getting dressed. When we arrived the lights were off and people were sitting all around the room. Grant greeted us and began to tell the ghost that Kiel was there and asked if he would like to say anything. A woman was repeating what she heard from the headphones again. The ghost’s name was Steve and he was high as a kite. He really wanted to talk to the girls.

Normally this would just seem random but the last time we stayed in this room was for New Year’s Eve 2016. (See pictures above. Original post here) A big group of our friends stayed at the hotel to ring in the New Year and we all headed up to our room at the end of the night to continue the party. Everyone in the room was a familiar face. At some point this random middle aged guy named Steve opened the door and came into the room. He refused to leave. He kept going on about how high he was and how wanted to talk to the girls. Our friend John escorted him out of the room with a little bit of a struggle. He ended up sneaking back in for a second time when someone opened the door to leave and we eventually called hotel security. It was a little unsettling. The next day there was not a trace of him in the hotel or lobby. It was like he appeared out of nowhere.

I don’t have any logical explanation for this series of events but there is no way any one in that room could have known about Steve or the things he was saying on New Year’s Eve in 2016. We never found out why the ghost was saying Kiel’s name over and over again but we were more than a little freaked out. Kiel probably more so than me. I walked into the weekend a skeptic and came out a believer. While I love the hotel, we didn’t sleep a wink that night. It might be a little while before we return again. I will return! I’ve stayed there many times and the ghosts have never bothered me."

Julie Tremaine, who co-wrote Amy Bruni's book with her was also on a Strange Escapes and wrote about it for Paste Magazine, "I invited the remaining people back to the Princess Room for another investigation. There were maybe 20 of us in the room, including Bruni, Berry, Tenney, and Greg and Dana Newkirk, who use haunted objects in their paranormal investigations. Dana pulled tarot cards while Tenney guided us through setting our intention and amplifying our collective energy. Bruni and Greg asked the questions in the EVP session. The Princess is hard to make contact with, probably because so many people go there trying to talk to her, but whatever we were doing was working. Bruni started asking her about the gala events she used to throw at the hotel, especially about New Year’s Eve, her biggest bash of them all.

We started getting some real answers. Nothing too controversial, just about how much she loved those parties, but we really felt like we were talking to Princess Carolyn. As the mood in the room got lighter and lighter—those results were a big deal to all of us—we started hearing some knocks on the walls around us. And when we burst into laughter, the lights flickered. Someone else made a joke, we all laughed, and it happened again. This time the lights dimmed for a few seconds.

At this point, I had been staying in the room for 36 hours, and I hadn’t heard a single knock or seen those lights flicker even one other time.

Then my eyes glanced down to the nightstand, the same one the head of housekeeping had talked about before. “Guys,” I said, “look at that drawer.”

It was open two inches.

I was standing closest to that nightstand, so I would have known if someone had touched it. It really seemed like whatever had opened it for Mark had opened it for us, too. We all looked at it for a few minutes, then pushed the drawer back in.

Shortly after that, people started to filter out. I was staying, so I was behind everyone who was leaving. I turned around to make sure there were no stragglers, and that’s when I saw it.

The drawer was open again, only this time it was completely open.

I had closed it myself. Dana came back inside, and tried to do something that would make the drawer open on its own. We pushed it, pulled it, tested whether a coat could have caught on it, jumped on the floor in front of it, walked heavily across the room towards it. Nothing moved it at all.

“I need to get out of this room,” I said to her. “I just need to use the bathroom first.”

“Ok,” she said. “We’ll wait for you in the hall.” I closed the hotel room door, went into the bathroom, came out a minute or so later, and ran to the door.

“Get back in here!” I yelled.

This time, the top drawer was open. And I had been completely alone in the room. There is no chance any living person did that."

This story was shared on the website Two Sisters Abroad, "In 1997, I was working as a housekeeper and had to clean room #314, the Princess’s Room. I went to service the room, that newlyweds were staying in, and I knocked on the door and there was no answer. I opened the door went in and there was a little girl sleeping on the bed. Immediately, I went to the hallway to see my inspector, and told her I couldn’t clean the room because a little girl was sleeping. She said that was odd because the guests were newlyweds and nobody else was registered. She asked me to leave a note that I was coming back in an hour to service the room. I went back in the room to leave the note by the table. I walked in the room quietly to not to wake the little girl up. When I looked at the bed, instead of a little girl there was a woman staring right at me with the most scary smile on her face. She had black hair and was wearing a white dress. I got chills down my spine and I just stood there frozen. She sat on the bed and kept staring at me. I ran out of the room and told my friend who was also a housekeeper. We both went back in the room and there was no one there. I still have a hard time remembering that incident and I get chills every time I speak about it. I have many friends that have worked there and I heard a lot of scary things that happened. Oh, the day before this happened my friend and I took pictures of ourselves on the Princess’s bed; everybody tells me that I made her upset by doing that."

The website also shared this experience from a bartender, "I had a few experiences, but this is one that stands out the most: A few summers ago I was bartending in The Cave (hotel bar). It was just after we opened and I was standing on the side of the bar. No one was near the other end of the bar. The only people in the room were me, the other bartender, and the two guests that we were standing and chatting with. All of a sudden we heard a loud thud at the opposite end of the bar, and a stack of tea cups and saucers we had stacked underneath the bar came flying out at least 4 feet and smashed all over the place. No doubt in my mind there was a spirit in the room. The guests we were chatting with quickly finished up the conversation and left for the night. They never came back for a drink." 

An anonymous commenter wrote about a stay she had in Room 314 with her father in February 2021, "Now when we got in the room, the TV was acting quite strange and it took a while to get it to work. We decided to head off to the pool, so my dad was on the bed and I was walking into the bathroom with my back turned to my father. I turned for a moment and saw the bottom drawer of the left side of the bed opened (this bedside table seems to be where the most paranormal al stuff happens in the room). I changed in the bathroom and as we went down to the pool, I met these kids about my age and told them all about the room and they were really curious, so my dad and I showed them the room. We had closed the drawer and when we got up to the room, the drawer was opened again. The family left and we laid down to watch some TV and I started to feel uncomfortable, like I was being watched and I turn my head and I see ever so slightly the bottom drawer opening. I was super scared. Me and my dad decided to leave the room for a while, so we go to the lobby where we told a bunch of people all about our experience with the drawer in the room. The bartender comes up and asks us if we are staying in room #314 and when we replied yes, he said, 'Oh my gosh, you’re not going to believe it, but two ladies just checked out and said that the drawers kept opening and they kept getting tapped on the leg when they slept.' Later, I was looking at the Princess' picture in the lobby and I said how it was a beautiful portrait. Then I felt a hand move across my hair really fast, almost like my mother was playing with my hair. I turned around and no one was there. I was in total shock. I couldn’t believe what just happened. We decided to go back into the room and I was sitting near the fire place with some chips. I went to put the chips away, so I leaned over the bed and I saw that the two bedside drawers were open. And then in the morning,  as we were saying goodbye, the drawer opened as if she was saying good-bye."

The Mount Washington Hotel is still a Grand Hotel and the setting is so beautiful with Mount Washington in the background with its usual snow-capped peak. It could be a scene out of a travel book or a scene from a Stephen King novel. Is Mount Washington Hotel haunted? That is for you to decide!